"Blahs like humie. Hab gizmos like stuntees. No clomp like orc."
"Skah, dat nub orc. Sum tall big'noz datz green, mebbe."
She had come to expect as much. For all their accomplishments beyond the tainted blood, her people - if she could even call them that - remained so nearsighted, so prejudiced, it confounded her. Or sent her fleeing from their blades and nets. Even the mighty Thrall could not impose upon them his understanding, his sense. Many were entrenched in old hatreds with walls about their hearts taller than what any dwarf could ever build.
"I don't give freebies and I don't keep tabs, so pay up!" snapped the barkeep, his shrill voice the cry of coins in a till. The conversations about her lowered to an unintelligible rumbling.
"Another. And don't thin it out," she cut back with a sneer, gloved hand depositing six tarnished silver pieces onto the bar. The goblin immediately eyed them with keen interest. Quicker were his fingers to snatch them up.
"You'd think with the water crisis, they wouldn't be so.. ah.. liberal with it," thundered a tauren two stools down from her. No doubt a derisive remark colored the barkeep's quiet mumblings that followed. The bull had a point, but that didn't stop Gadgetzan from stretching their supply of Rumsey Rum.
She scoffed, which was about all the laughter she could muster. Maybe the hint of a grin, too. It was true, and humorously ironic.
"You look out of place here, huntress. Just visiting?"
Bring on the banter. This is the way it always starts, and she could almost spit. Males. Those that didn't berate her outright would abuse her in other ways, take an hour's worth of pleasure, and then move on. She had half a mind to confront the bull and ask him, straight out, if he'd rather go behind the inn or outside the city walls. Her reply surprised even herself.
"Visiting."
"Ah. You're lucky. Wait until a sandstorm comes and you're stuck here for a week, or longer. Raiders hit the caravans and you can't get back to Freewind, and nobody's going through Un'goro." His laugh was like a landslide, all these boulders banging about inside his chest. "Ships don't run out of Steamweedle either."
Again, against her better judgment, she turned to regard him directly. She could have ignored him. Here was a tauren almost like any other, but weathered by wind and sand and showing a shirt of scars. A once healthy coat of ebon had lost its luster, and streaks of gray were prominent. The tauren, in turn, sized her up. There was a power and kindness in his eyes, something she often saw in his kind and never in orcs.
"Tamsinela." She nodded, politely.
The tauren's thick lips quirked into a grin, and he bowed his horned head. The tip of one horn was missing, the cut clean, shorn off by a blade and just recently too. "Longtail."
A glass of Black Label arrived before her, as ordered. It was enough to draw her attention from the tauren, though she replied while staring into the murky spirits. "'s a pleasure." For the first time in a long time, this wasn't a total lie.